Instructional Designers Needs to Consider Learning Theories in Technology

In my eyes, an Instruction Designer role is very similar to the role as a Behaviorist in the school setting.  Both roles work directly with students and the ability to train staff, especially teachers.   When working with students, one has to consider how am I going to effectively engage the student to learn?  In the readings we learned about how to motivate a student and where a student may fall in the different kinds of learning theories and what type of learning styles can be used to increase learning.

Behaviorism theory has always been the center of my belief system when it came to learning.  I have always thought my own skills were built from this theory until now.  In this course I have learned multiple theories; Cognitivist, Constructivist, Connectivism, Social Learning (Ormrod, 2009).  Post conversations with my peers have presented me that not everybody falls under Behaviorism and that the other theories can relate to their needs of learning.   As I implemented ideas from these theories to try to figure out my students learning styles, I came to realization that there are only two kinds of learning theories, Cognitive and Behaviorism theory, everything else falls into these theories.  My most recent blog entry before this has my reason why I believe this to be true. 

When I train teachers I would always consider their input before I would implement interventions for the classroom or student. This course had me think: if I can figure out how the teacher’s learning style is then this will help in what type of approach I can use to train them.    All of these face to face interactions have been wonderful on implementing interventions for my program, but as an instructional designer I will not have the advantages of having face to face interactions.  I will have to learn how to transfer all of personal interactions onto a computer program.  I have already been able to utilize programs like excel and online programs to help view my data.  When I would show teachers graphs on theirs students learning performance, they are amazed to see the numbers.   I would tell them the data is always there, it just needs to be organized and this information can easily be formatted by technology.  As I start to convert from behaviorist to instructional designer I will now need to find ways to convert my skills to be utilized completely by technology.

When I studied undergraduate at Rutgers U, online learning was not available to me.  Retrieving information for my papers meant having to physically go to the library.  While in the library card catalogs were no longer available, computer stations were present and had to use the iris system to find information.  We have come along way from this.  Now I can find everything I need from the comfort of my home, just as long as I have a computer with internet access.  Today, Connectivism becomes the digital library, but the library has also expanded beyond the workings of scholars.

In the digital world any body can post their opinion without having any discipline in learning the material.  Connectivism is how or where the learner accesses information, this makes online learning successful. 

Google search engine is my key to the internet knowledge.  Everything I have found came from there.  I even use Mozilla Firefox as my web browser.   Firefox allows me to place as many bookmarks on my browser tab at once, this add on is called speed dial.  On my browser tab I can place multiple groups each labeled for different functions.  I have one group has my bills, another has free websites for education, my work bookmarks, personal websites, and websites for Walden course information.  Each group can hold between 2 rows and 2 columns of live bookmark screens to infinite amount of rows and columns.  Now infinite amount of screens would be hard to see so I would suggest no more than 10 rows and 10 columns.  I have each of my groups set to 6 rows with 6 columns.

 In the start of this course I have learned to use BlogSpot as a blog, before I have used it to set up a website for my wife’s side business.  Google reader was a nice site to learn as I have Google reader app placed on my droid phone.  On down time at work I can quickly access people’s feeds.  I am trying to find an App that can handle Walden’s University’s platform, but I still have not succeeded.  There are so many applications out in the internet that can be used for education purposes, to learn and to facilitate learning. 

Since there has been an increase in resources in the internet this will give a large amount of learning processes to occur, but the down fall is knowing which resource are true and which are not.  As I mention before the internet has no filter for discipline on the knowledge it is reporting.  As a learner the ability to filter the information on the internet also becomes a learning process.

Connectivism Academic Mapping

Neuroscience on Learning

In this weeks lesson we were learning connections of the brain and learning.  I was fascinated with ideas of storing and retrieval of information.  I wanted to look on new studies on brain activity, so I looked for Neuroscience ideas.

An Oxford university scientist, Dr Cohen Kadosh, believes that a small electrical current to the brain can make you better at learning math.  The electrical current has to pass through the parietal lobe of the brain from a certain direction.  His study shows if the current flows from right to left, the individuals did well in math, but if the current flow was left to right, then the individuals were significantly poor in math.  Also for individual who didn’t have any current flow, did not perform as well as the individual that had current flow from right to left, and did better than the individual that had current flow from left to right.  This new discovery can help people with Dyscalculia, referred as math dyslexia.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130896102

As I was browsing through the Society for Neuroscience website, I happen to come across a section of Dyslexia about the Brain Research Success Stories.  On the section of Dyslexia, I found it interesting that scientist have found gene markers for dyslexia on several chromosomes.   Scientist has also found that people with dyslexia have a glitch in their neurological wiring that makes them extremely difficult for them to read.  There has been one study that has shown immune proteins in the brain maybe causing the wiring to go wrong.  New studies are trying to figure out if the role of hormones in neurotransmitters affects reading.  Knowing genetic and possible biochemical causes of dyslexia will help experts more accurately treat and diagnose individuals.  Scientists are also looking on the affects of early intervention, to see if it will allow rewiring to occur.

http://www.sfn.org/index.aspx?pagename=brainResearchSuccessStories

Click on Dyslexia section.

Blogging & Websites I found Useful

Web 2.0 is a social network in education.  I have been looking at this website for about a month, impressed with the openness atmosphere shown between colleagues.  Discussions can be from how to motivate a student, to how to challenge a non-traditional classroom.  There was a conversation that caught my eye talking about the student’s usage of cell phones in school.  I enjoyed reading the different points of view, and reminded me of our school policy.  In our school we have banned cell phones for 7 months last year because our students were abusing the usage of them in the classroom.  Then once we had control the principal allowed the students to use their cell phones only during breakfast, lunch, and during dismissal.  If there cell phones were used during classroom time they would be taken away for the rest of the day.  I can say this plan has been a success because the majority of the students have been responsible with their phones.  At the end of last year I had made a survey with Survey Monkey and had questions for the students on how they thought about their subjects.  With survey monkey I was able to send the survey to their cell phones and all of them responded.  This year we are continuing the same cell phone plan since the end of last year, but are considering the usage of cell phones in the classroom for educational purposes.

http://www.classroom20.com/

Thinkfinity is a nice website that gives teachers learning materials in any level of education.  I can find multiple lesson plans for any given subject and grade from K-12.  At the same time the website has activities for students and parents that can be used at home.  This is great resource for any person looking for information on making a learning environment.

http://www.thinkfinity.org/

With being on top of new ways for teaching, I think it also important to be on top of the new computer technology.  I like visiting this PC world news website, so I can see what type of new technology I can use in the schools.  Since I know how to build my own pc and install any operating system, knowing advance parts are coming thrills me.   When Droid came out with apps, I started to think what type of app I can make for the classroom.  I haven’t learned how to make apps yet but I have a friend who can so I collaborated with him to make an app that can take data in the classroom using voice recognition.   At the end of the day the app would email me the data from each teacher then I would collect the data and sync it to my excel datasheet.  PC News is a nice technology website to use.

http://www.pcworld.com/blogs.html